The principal methods presently used for skin cooling before or during the laser treatment involve the use of a cold contacting window or cryogenic spray device. Cryogenic spray directly to the skin may reduce a skin temperature below 0 C. but can freeze the skin and cause significant damage to it. Cold contacting windows of the prior art can cool the surface of the skin to as low as 4 C. But prior art cold contact window devices are inadequate to remove enough heat to prevent unwanted surface tissue damage in many applications.
Three prior art techniques are described in the following United States patents: C. Chess, Apparatus for treating cutaneous vascular lesions, U.S. Pat. No. 5,486,172; Anderson et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,595,568; and C. Chess, Method for treating cutaneous vascular lesions, U.S. Pat. No. 5,282,797. All of these devices and methods provide for the cooling of the skin up to temperature of 4 C. but not below it.
A different technique is described by J. S. Nelson et al., in the article "Dynamic Epidermal Cooling in Conjunction With Laser-Induced Photothermolysis of Port Wine Stain Blood Vessels, Lasers in Surgery and Medicine 1996;19:224-229. In this technique the direct cryogenic spray to the skin surface is used before the laser pulse delivery. This method is normally not satisfactory. The surface gets too cold and the subsurface layers are not sufficiently cooled so that unwanted damage occurs at the surface because the tissue gets too cold from the cryogen and/or unwanted damage occurs in the immediate subsurface layers because the tissue gets too hot from the laser beam.
What is needed is a better laser surgery cooling method to better control tissue temperature during laser treatments.